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Sumit SinghalSumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination.

ORIGAMI ark in Himeji, Japan by Matsuya Art Works

This showroom is built to sustain the tanners in the leather manufacturing business, which is local traditional industry in Himeji City, a suburban city in Japan. The showroom highlights the enormous range of leather materials that makes the clients strength and meets his wish to communicate and show the diversity of his products. This specificity leads us to focus on the interior design that allows us to better display the project rather than the exterior shape of the building. The request was to display over 3000 leather items in a very narrow exhibition space limited to 300 m². In order to respond to this range, a second and third floor must be built, however separating the display into several floors might not leave the wanted impression of the huge diversity of leather products offered by the house. Therefore, the Idea was to build an enormous three-dimensional fixture in a single exhibition room. A huge frame was built in shape of a jungle gym using 100x100mm² square steel pipes, creating a three dimensional display fixture. The Grand dimensions of this fixture creates in the visitors mind an impressive understanding of the overwhelming range of products with a single glance. Moreover, leaving more space to move freely provides an experience similar to exploring a jungle gym inside making the discovery of the leather materials’ variety more exciting.

In addition to this enormous fixture interior design and despite the fact that it is about a showroom for a traditional industry, the exterior appearance of the building is made into a futuristic shape close to a spaceship, but this shape was actually inspired by the Japanese traditional origami. Nearly 3000 leather items were placed inside an enormous ark made like an origami and shipped off into the future, producing a metaphor and a poetic expression of the client’s hope that leather material used by our civilization since the ancient times will continue to be commonly used in the future.